I love the idea of steadfast self-preservation despite obvious wrongdoing, something that is not often approached in storytelling, and there are many enlightened observations in the eloquent imagery, but on the whole this short story seemed fairly superficial to me. The most obvious sentiment to gather from this short story is that without bad there is no good, but do we ever have to create this negativity ourselves in order to feel happiness? There are countless examples of humans creating situations to bring themselves pleasure and in doing so ruining the lives of others, but is the focal point to create pain or pleasure? They all justify the situation by saying the child is a necessary scapegoat for their negative emotions, and that they must counteract this grotesque act with glee-filled lives. We are not told why this child is forced to suffer – locked away and not talked to or fed properly, continuously sitting in its own excrement – all we know is that the community uses the child’s misery to fuel their own contentment.īut there are people in the city that cannot dismiss this child’s presence so easily, and every so often a inhabitant of Omelas walks away with no plan or direction, just a desire to leave and never return. For an unknown reason this child remains in this dark, tiny cell as a shameful secret among the Omelaians, a lone figure to endure evil, hardship and pain so the rest of the city doesn’t have to. The narrator explains, in a somewhat convoluted way, that Omelas is a happy place because the inhabitants are trying to make the suffering of a child locked in a cellar seem worthwhile. The unreliable narrator gradually shifts from describing a joyous, utopian state to a sinister, beguiling place where rot lies undetected in between hyperbolic positivity.Īnd then the we are hit with such horrid, disturbing imagery that, even know it’s obvious something sinister is looming, the language still manages to evoke shock and disgust. Guin adds layer upon layer of uplifting descriptions for the inhabitants of Omelas, but as it builds momentum the reader begins to detect a level of spite and aggression in between the lines. The narrator describes a community of intelligent yet happy people, rightly stating that ‘we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid’, but the people of Omelas are both complex and competent. They describe a deliriously happy carnival in the city of Omelas where excited children play and their parents gather to begin some sort of unnamed festivity. The story is conveyed via a faceless but opinionated narrator. The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas is a bleak, philosophical tale that, although plotless, has a pretty punchy ending to it. On my never ending quest to discover more dystopian short stories, I stumbled across this little gem. The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K.
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